Jonas Wergeland presented the progression of these four main thought processes by showing Svend Foyn sitting in more and more deckchairs until at last — just before all of his thoughts intertwined to give one solution — there were four Svend Foyns, or Foyn quadruplets, sitting side by side on the beach looking out to sea and the waves rolling to shore. Foyn, or the Foyn quads, thought of the whale’s progress through the sea, the whale’s speed and power, the whale’s need to breathe, considered how long the whale stayed on the surface each time it came up; Foyn wrestled with financial forecasts, pondered the question of whale oil and all the uses to be found for whalebone, from corset stays to fishing rods, contemplated the matter of oil residue, and wondered whether the guano could be used as fertiliser; Foyn thought about the boat, about the size of the boat, its manoeuvrability, its crew; and above all Foyn applied his mind to the subject of the whaling tackle: what the line should be like, how many barbs the harpoon should have, how the bomb tip should be constructed, whether it ought to explode when it hit the target or seconds later; he considered the blending of the gunpowder, the fuse, his work with Esmark, the country parson and gifted chemist and the lessons he had learned from previous, unsuccessful, attempts by others: all of them had come up with a piece of the puzzle, but only he, Foyn, would succeed in fitting all the pieces together in his head.
The invention of the bomb harpoon, the absolute sine qua non of the modern whaling industry and cornerstone of Norway’s first oil age, represented the culmination of all these thoughts on the whale as raw material, on the vessel’s construction, on the animal’s behaviour in the sea, on the properties of the harpoon; the result of these thoughts being considered at one and the same time, in concord, inside Svend Foyn’s head. In the last scene but one, at the moment when the solution dawned on Foyn, actually in the form of a series of inventions springing to mind at the same moment, Jonas Wergeland showed him — which is to say all four Foyn quads — jumping up and shouting in unison: ‘I have it!’ From there Wergeland cut quickly to the final scene in which, like an echo of that cry, the harpoon hit the whale and exploded inside its body with a muffled, yet mighty boom — a fanfare, almost; and that this strike should have been regarded by viewers as a great victory, a climactic shout of triumph, at a time when whaling was so unpopular, proves just what a masterpiece this programme was. The viewers did not see the whale’s death as something bad or traumatic, but as something symbolic: it was not a whale that had been caught, but a difficult and complex concept, a leviathan of the imagination. The passage of the harpoon through the air represented the flight of thought, and the impact with the whale signified the explosive moment of insight.
With a little good will Jonas Wergeland could be said to have laid the foundations of this programme when he was just a boy, in a basement — in the darkness of the deep, you might even say — at the time when his skipping fever was at its height. Before too long, however — he could not have said exactly when, but possibly during the transition from boy to youth — he discovered that he could make his thoughts branch out even without skipping, although it still worked best — and would, in fact do so for the rest of his life — when he had a rope whirling through the air around him, as if this gave him a particularly good charge. Whatever the case: by dint of thought Jonas was forever trying — with or without a rope — to become like a tree, to branch out. Most people strive to become pure and upright, to become pillars, poles, the sort of thing from which to fly a flag. Jonas wanted to be a tree. He often wandered around inspecting the different trees of Norway. When he was at the height of his fame he considered, not altogether in jest, writing his autobiography and calling it My Life As An Oak.
Although Jonas believed that he was really on to something, there came a point in his teens when he put his skipping, or rather: his thought experiments, on ice. He was, if the truth be told, a little alarmed by what he had discovered. On the one hand he felt his gift was a problem. He was afraid that he would never have the chance to use it. That he possessed abilities which would never do anything but confuse him. On the other hand, he hoped that it was only a matter of becoming more mature, gaining more experience. Then he would be able to resume his experiments. In any case, one thing was slowly borne in upon him, the longer he lived: there were possibilities, powers, within the realms of thought greater than anyone could imagine. Sometimes when he was contemplating, ruminating, he was conscious of a kind of mental ‘lift off’, a feeling of acceleration not unlike the ‘boost’ you get in the small of your back in a plane just before it takes off, as it approaches the end of the runway and suddenly picks up speed. In the long process of mankind’s evolution, Jonas knew, we had not got beyond the very beginning. So far, man had only raised his body upright, not his mind. We had no right to our species name. We were Homo erectus and Homo sapiens on the outside, but not on the inside. It was one thing to walk upright, quite another to think upright. To be upstanding in one’s mental life. When it came to awareness, man was still crawling ignorantly around on all fours.
But this line of reasoning was a thing of the future. For many years of his childhood skipping was one of Jonas’s favourite pastimes. He skipped and skipped, as if unconsciously reaching out for something more, reaching upwards. He built shell after shell, layer upon layer around himself with the rope, and one day when he was skipping in the dark in the basement, in the midst of a heart-stopping, minutes-long stint of doubles, just as he felt that something was about to rip wide open, a veil be swept aside, as four or five thoughts which he was pursuing simultaneously began to converge, like the numbers in a combination lock which would suddenly click together to open a set of great, heavy doors — when he was just about there, only an arm’s length away, he passed out.